Fast French

FRANCE has won back from West Germany the speed record for a train, after a new TGV (train a grande vitesse, or very fast train) reached 482.4 kilometres per hour on a stretch of line near Tours - about half the cruising speed of a passenger jet. West Germany's ICE (InterCity Experimental) train won the record last year with 407 km/h.

'It's a speed close to the limit of commercial hardware, but we can still hope to get above 500 kilometres per hour,' said Pierre Delfosse, in charge of the trials. The French railway industry believes that if conventional trains can reach 500 km/h, they will see off the challenge from trains that rely on maglev, or magnetic levitation.

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